The New Yorker Founder and Editor Harold Ross was a man of many maxims.
Among them: "Nobody gives a damn about a writer or his problems except
another writer." Assuming that his readers had no interest in reading
about his writers, Ross kept intramural gossip out of his magazine, and
so has his successor William Shawn. Yet neither editor could stem the
tide of moonlight memoirs by New Yorker staffers. James Thurber gave
Ross himself a full-dress treatment in The Years with Ross (1959). Now,
on the magazine's 50th birthday...